


limited time for pizza

by ScherbenByOpium



Category: Temple Run, Temple Run 2
Genre: Angst, Gen, That's right, temple run angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 20:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2554916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScherbenByOpium/pseuds/ScherbenByOpium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do you want to buy one Tom Brady for £0.69?</p><p>...Temple Run is one depressing game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	limited time for pizza

It occurs to Montana one day that he’s been in the game a while now.

 

He realises this tearing a knot of beef jerky hard from being at the bottom of his bag so long to strips with his teeth; from the other side of the small fire they’ve built up from an assortment of twigs of varying degrees of dryness and Montana’s pocket lighter, Scarlett pauses in unwinding the strapping from her ankle to roll her eyes at him. Less out of disgust than habit, he now knows, not that someone who digs out soggy pizza and offers him a slice each time – since he’d met her for the first time, battered and wincing and feeling that he wasn’t doing a very good job of justifying his price tag, and she’d just sighed, rolled her eyes and shoved pizza at him like a _‘quit-whining-you-baby’_ – should be allowed to judge anything else as disgusting. (He never declines, but that’s not the point.)

 

Her hair – already loose when he had arrived here on this floating island none of them were meant to arrive at, but the game, thankfully, glitches more often than he’d have thought – falls fiery to her shoulders as she straightens again. There’s a cut high on one cheekbone, a scrape by her jaw – not much to show for the number of times she’s died, or the number of times he (running himself, running running but where to? He’s sure it must bother them all, but then he can never be sure and he has no time to wonder, only run) has glimpsed her slide towards a jet of flame and not appear again the other side, tear more than the tip of her boot clearing the metal that spikes higher than she is tall, or simply run until she runs out of ground, and plummets into air that won’t hold her running.

 

He used to think that this was why she denied him, grey eyes cool enough for him to burn with embarrassment instead, snatching back hastily with half a mumbled apology. He still thinks so, that death is an uncomfortable, unspoken intimacy between them that leaves no room for any other kind, but now he has eyes to see the looks she gives Guy, the rare times all three of them are together, softer and more patient than she’d ever given him because Guy, of late, looks – awful. Montana wouldn’t have been able to hold a grudge against him for it anyway, even if the other man didn’t always look so wild and ragged at the edges, eyes constantly darting, jumpy, from beneath the scraggly red of his hair: he’s content with pizza and companionship, friendship, even, if anything borne from their circumstances could be called that.

 

And anyhow, he knows his enemies, and it’s not the ones who share the same predicament as him, not even Karma (as fast as he is and stronger), with her cutesy-princess-gone-vagabond outfit who knocks his hat off and calls him a boy; not even Maria, with no signal but glued to her smartphone nevertheless, tapping and sighing (he’d found her annoying, at first, but then she’d looked up at him, sharp, and showed him Temple Run 2; he’s been slightly wary of her since); not even Francisco (whose name sounds odd in his head: he by far prefers ‘Montoya’, Montoya who mutters under his breath and takes off by himself and has definitely had more than pizza, but even then Montana doesn’t hate him).

 

He runs a hand through his hair – greasy, cropped short with a blade Scarlett had somehow procured; theirs wasn’t a glamorous lifestyle – to clear his thoughts, and reaches for the gauze. The burn at his elbow is second degree, not as bad as it might have been (and will be, no doubt, because none of them stay lucky forever). His arm wasn’t, a few runs back, but that’s healing as well as it can, under the wrappings he hasn’t changed since.

 

They’re silent – there’s never much to say, at least not to each other (Barry’s easier to be around in this respect, good of both humour and nature). He’s the one to break it.

 

 _Have you seen the new ones,_ he asks, and Scarlett narrows her eyes at him.

 

 _Manning, and Brady?_ she asks, mouth pulling tight. _Yeah._

It’s as much as she needs to say.

 

He’d bumped into the two of them in the corridor a run or two ago, throwing a football about with bordering-comical intensity and enthusiasm, and looking as if they hadn’t yet left it. Which was to say, clean, and fresh and as pumped-up as he hadn’t been. (He’d have judged them for the football, too, but Zack had a football _and_ a helmet he still struggles to see as practical, and _he’s_ stuck around.)

 

 _Hey, I’m Tom,_ one of them had grinned at him as he tried to push his way past and out, teeth gleaming as bright a white as his kit. He had black horizontal bars smeared onto his face; Montana didn’t ask why. _Peyton_ , the other – tall and broad as only his fellow, and of course Zack (Montana wondered if they knew each other, from somewhere other than here, from wherever these two had sprung up from, flashy and mistakenly, foolishly energetic, and if Zack would be more delighted or sad if that were the case) – had nodded.

 

 _Out the way_ , he’d snapped at them, not quite caring about making a friendly first impression when the idol had weighed sickeningly heavy in his bag where he’d shoved it, careless and practiced, and the ring around his finger – the Demon’s Claw this time, six more in the pocket that’d come from, he’d toss the lot if he could but he doesn’t even know how to begin to try – tight, biting, as if it knew its rightful owner was coming. Which was more than the two footballers had known, evidently. Either that, or it was sense they had both lacked, to duck somewhere out of the way lest they meet a swift end as a Monkey’s mid-morning snack.

 

 _Going so soon? We aren’t gonna be round for long, y’know,_ Tom-or-Peyton had laughed after him. Then there was the sound of a ball thudding off stone walls, but he was gone, out, and it was no longer his concern. (Limited edition, then. The only other limited edition he knows is Santa Claus. He’d briefly wondered if eccentricity ran in the make.)

 

Scarlett leans over, snaps her fingers and him out of his musings. Snickers when he jumps.

 

 _We aren’t gonna be around for long_ , they’d said, and _no,_ (he thinks with his next slice of pizza, toasted crisp and almost palatable), _I don’t expect you shall_.


End file.
